


null and void instead of voices

by mathonwys



Series: i'm looking at you through the glass [5]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Cloning Blues, F/M, Flux Buddies, Hurt/Comfort, Lalnable's Lab, Red Panda Labs, set during Flux Buddies 64 and up til 68
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4358465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mathonwys/pseuds/mathonwys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Science Journal 387," she read out slowly from the scribbly, all-too-familiar handwriting on the cover. "By... by Lalna."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i rewatched the episodes and now im rewriting and also burning
> 
> SO. LALNABLE FUCKING HECTOR. my response to those episodes was pretty much upset yelling and throwin fits. fuck that guy. so of course how are the flux buds gonna react to what they found?
> 
> hint: not well.

The castle was a nightmare. Taint squished under her feet and throbbed in her head like she'd had threads wrapping around her, pleading, "please don't go, we need you", and it was only Lalna's chatter stopping her from turning back and entering the Flux sphere again. Nano could feel it lurking, though. She knew it was always just out of sight, always tugging at her like a nagging child. Seeing the courtyard, her room, the sorting system overrun and corroded by Flux gave her mixed feelings she didn't understand. She'd cried when she saw the  fountain, but a part of her had rejoiced, too.

If only the whole world looked like this, that part of her said. If only everything was Flux.

She shook her head and put a purple-stained hand to her forehead. She could hear Lalna speaking in her ear via the communicator: "There's something down here I want to look into, I don't remember it at all," and she followed down with her usual complaining. The concussive burst of a rocket detonating underwater made her nearly jump out of her skin; Lalna's quiet "oop" told her all she needed to know, though, and she made a big show of rolling her eyes as she flew over to where her friend was knee-deep in Flux-tainted water. He wasn't being very smart about this, but he hadn't been smart in the sphere earlier either.

The memory of the sphere increased the tugging feeling deep inside her, and Nano fought against it hard. She needed to focus. What was Lalna on about? "Well done," she deadpanned as she surveyed the wreckage. After a moment of thought, she uncorked one of the night-vision potions they'd found and downed it; the murky underwater suddenly lit up as if daytime, and she paused with her eyes wide open.

"I've-- I've opened it," Lalna replied sheepishly. "I've... opened a door." He suddenly sounded unsure, confused even, and suspicion went up a few levels on the "Lalna is a creepy bastard" meter. "It, it was like a-- there's an airlock that I just blew open."

"What the heck is...?" Nano plunged underwater and narrowed her eyes. Surely enough, there was... something under the water. "What the heck is that?" She let herself sink down further, then kicked forwards to examine whatever the hell Lalna had uncovered. "This wasn't here when we--"

Lalna cut her off. "No, I didn't build this. This isn't me." He sounded... unsure. Nervous.

"Well, that said, I wouldn't question you if you had crazy secret labs in your, lab." Nano snorted with laughter as she realized how ridiculous that sounded. Lalna didn't join her in it.

"My lab was a crazy secret lab," Lalna pointed out. "It doesn't need another secret..." He trailed off.

"But it wouldn't surprise me if you had other bits-- what is this." Nano had followed him through the airlock. Purple water gave way to grey walls and a green floor; it was decorated sparely, yet had a different feeling to it than the lab Nano had spent her apprenticeship in. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and scanned the room. It felt... ominous.

"I don't know," Lalna said softly. "This isn't-- this isn't any of my stuff, here." He ran his hands over the computer nestled in a corner as Nano scrutinized it. Dread was slowly building inside him, turning his face into an emotionless mask. Someone had been in his castle. Why?

Nano glanced around. "This is, weird," she stumbled out. "What-- what is this, some kind of crazy airlock?"

"Yeah, I uh. I broke it when I shot the rocket." He ran his hand through his hair and avoided her unimpressed look. "It was an accident! I didn't mean to!"

"Well done," Nano rolled her eyes. "Well, at least we're in. ...I've never seen this, but I wouldn't be surprised if you had weird secrets you wouldn't show an apprentice."

"No, I didn't do this."  It came out sounding way too hasty. He dragged his hand over his face and whined softly into the glove. Nano didn't hear. "Stand here, I'm heading back home." The scientist hopped through the portal she opened before she could even say goodbye. "Don't do anything weird!"

"What counts as weird?" He didn't answer and Nano groaned before plopping down on a stack of cardboard boxes. Then the answer came: "swimming naked in Flux or something," and the most she could do was take off her headset and yell "WOW" into the microphone in faked indignation. She could still hear him laughing. With a groan she tossed the headset aside and stomped up to the glass. "Stupid Lalna, thinks so little of me, stupid stupid stupid..."

Her eyes unfocused. The pull was stronger now, like two unalike magnets drifting near each other, and she put her hands against the glass and began to hum. "Twinkle twinkle, little star..." she whispered. It would be so easy to go back into the sphere and rejoin the Flux. Who cared about Lalna and his stupid science junk? All she had to do was walk out the airlock. "How I wonder what you are..."

"Hey! Hey, listen!"

Lalna stuck his head in front of her view and Nano yelled in frustration. He laughed and put her communicator back on her ear. She screeched in response; Lalna laughed harder. He tossed a staff at her and she caught it, only to raise it threateningly. "No, no," Lalna cajoled, "like this." He grabbed her arm and pointed the staff tip at the floor. "These are travel anchors, you just need a staff of traveling and then you--"

Vworp.

Space shifted around her and reality became black walls and caution stripes. "Whoa," she whispered. "What is this?! I don't like it," she decided. Her boots clanged against metal as she stepped out past the door and surveyed whatever fresh hell Lalna had brought her into. Her eyes traveled to a switch on the wall. "Containment off, extreme danger," Nano read out.

"Awesome."

"What are we containing? What is  this?" Nano vworped over to another floor, then froze. "...Lalna? Why is there... imprisoned villagers in the bottom of your lab? Why are there cryogenic tubes? What... what... why... whaoo? Bad! This is bad, Lalna!"

"I don't know," Lalna answered nervously. He scooted out of the room to examine something she'd brushed past. "Massive reactor, too..."

"What we've just found, is bad!" she continued. "And it feels a little... evil." She paced the room, portal gun at the ready, then wandered out to explore the rest of the floor.

"I'm-- I'm not disagreeing with that, there's villagers here..." Lalna's voice crackled a little over the communicator, giving a strange effect as she also heard his voice bounce down the nigh-empty halls along with the chatter of villagers. "Should we set them free?"

Nano froze. "...Why is there a portal down here?"

Lalna stopped whatever he was doing and ran over. "What?"

Nano backed away from it. "There's a portal here, but it's not my portal." She checked her gun-- sure enough, red and blue, while the one sitting in front of her was a vivid teal. The red one was many stories up above, while the blue one, the one Lalna had popped out of while grabbing the staffs, was back at Panda Labs as usual. This was unsettling.  
Nano took a deep breath to steady herself and stepped through.

She hadn't expected to find the Thaumcraft lab on the other side. It was completely destroyed, but... she remembered it.  She ran her fingers along the jars; behind her, Lalna laughed as he rediscovered a Hungry Chest and gave it an approving pat on the lid. "I feel sad looking at all of this," she admitted. Like seeing the destroyed courtyard, seeing the ruined Thaumcraft lab left a gaping hole of longing inside her that she couldn't explained. She'd only seen it once, way back when she started her apprenticeship, but...

"It looks ominous," she finally said after a while. "The, whatever it is. It looks ominous." She glanced anxiously at the teal portal. "Why is it underneath your dungeon?"

"I don't know." Lalna shook his head, then gently took her hand and led her back through and to the room full of cells. "Come on, let's free those villagers."

Nano pulled her hand away from his, but followed all the same. "I don't... like this place, Lalna," she said softly. "I don't... Why? Like, why are there trapped villagers in here? Why do you have an evil lab underneath your evil lab?"

"I keep telling you, I didn't do this!" Lalna waved his staff around. "You were there, you know I didn't!"

"Yea but-- I only saw the obvious bits of your castle, I don't know if there's like-- other stuff." Nano stopped in her tracks. Tucked underneath the machine at the middle of the room was a small, ebony bookcase. She set her portal gun down and dropped to her knees to retrieve the single, yellow-spined book that sat in it. Dread filled her like a pool filling with water enough to fill the oceans.

"Science Journal 387," she read out slowly from the scribbly, all-too-familiar handwriting on the cover. "By... by Lalna."


	2. Chapter 2

"EXPLAIN IT!" Nano screamed.

She rounded on Lalna with fury in her eyes as she held the book up above her head. Lalna stared back at her with pure  terror written on his face. Was he the culprit of all of this? Was this his fault?! Rage built in her like a storm; she was shaking, her eyes burning with tears, as she threw it down on the floor and yelled. "I'M CONFUSED, AND ANGRY, AND-- AND SHOUTING!"  
  
"I'm confused as well!" Lalna gasped out. He moved to grab the journal, but Nano stomped on it and dragged it back over closer to her. "Can I read it-- let me see." She scrunched her  face up in displeasure, but kicked it over.  
  
"Don't do anything, just-- stay over there, just stay over there." She had her sword out. Lalna raised his hands in a gesture of peace and slowly bent down to his knees to pick up the book with one hand. Nano watched him like a hawk as he straightened back up and flipped the book open. "It's got your name on it," she reiterated. "It literally says Lalna in it!"  
  
Lalna tuned her out as he started to read.

>   
> The usage of Testificates as a source of unlimited power.  
>   
> Dr. Lalnable Hector

  
"That's-- that's not me, though," he whispered. Lalnable Hector? That... that couldn't be him. He was Lalna, end of story. Even at Yoglabs he had been signed up under the name "Dr. Livid"; it had been an intimidating name, sure, but combined with the constantly-broken coffee machine, and his last name being "Coffee", it had gradually evolved into a joke. He'd only started going by "Lalna" when he met Nano. "Livid" had been a name with too many... unfortunate memories attached.  
  
So who was Lalnable Hector?

>   
> January 17th, 2018  
>   
> I have discovered a way to harvest brainwave energy from captive Testificates and concert it into a usable power source!  
>   
> This book will detail and explain the process.

  
His hands shook. This... this sounded like one of his research journals. This was the tone of writing he'd used whenever cataloguing new info at Yoglabs. Hell, he had hundreds of journals back there detailing whatever wacky experiment they'd been testing in each holosuite-- all of them left behind once he was fired, of course, because it would do no good to take them with him when they were sorely needed there for the new hires.  
  
He flipped the pages, but the rest were missing. Lalna swallowed hard. All the Testificates here were being used for whatever horrible power source this "Lalnable" had discovered. He felt a little sick.  
  
"WHO'S LALNABLE HECTOR, THEN?" Nano bellowed with unchecked fury. "Explain who Lalnable Hector is, then, and why he's building a base underneath your base!"  
  
"I don't... know..." Lalna closed the journal and stared at it like it was a live scorpion wanting to attack him. His hands trembled. "I don't know. This-- this place is freaking me out, Nano." His voice cracked. Unbidden memories were rushing through his head: the kinds of experiments he'd done at Yoglabs, Rythian, the nukes-- whoever Lalnable was, he was picking up where Livid had left off.  
  
Yoglabs hadn't exactly been the most... moral of places, he knew that very well. He himself had been paid to commit atrocities in the name of science, up until said misendeavors put Yoglabs in danger and he'd been fired... after they'd taken all of his research and refined it, of course. The radiation and science and careless disregard for safety, but mostly the radiation, had done something to his genome that he just couldn't fix. He had created CloneSec, and he had cloned himself so many times that sometimes he couldn't even remember if he was the real Lalna anymore.  
  
But he had to be. All the other Lalnas were dead. Clones were risky business.  
  
"It's freaking me-- you're freaking me out," Nano snapped. "I don't-- I don't believe you, Lalna. I don't believe you, and I don't trust you." She narrowed her eyes and drew her lips back in a snarl. "It's pretty suspicious! I can't believe that you didn't realize this was built underneath your base! I'd be a bit more responsible with my property--"  
  
"This wasn't here," he cut in.  He tried to approach her, but she activated her jetpack and hovered out of reach in a shower of rainbow sparkles. Lalna watched her in desperation. "Nano," he whispered. "Please-- This wasn't here when, when the base got--"  
  
"Well I don't know that!" Nano shot back. She landed on top of the cryo-tubes and glared down at him. "Because, I don't know, it seems to me that a scientist might have secret places and doors and passwords and stuff."  
  
"No, you saw everything-- My castle WAS a secret lair, Nano! That was it!" She brushed past him and he hurried after her. Nano shot a look over her shoulder at him and he stopped in his tracks.  
  
Her smile was humorless. "I don't know-- maybe there were things you didn't want an apprentice to see." She disappeared out of sight behind the reactor. Lalna stood rooted to the spot for several long moments, then followed. This time Nano didn't push him away as they both climbed up on top of the reactor and sat side-by-side. His hand found hers.  
  
"You saw everything." Lalna squeezed her hand and ignored the sticky feeling of the Flux. "I promise, you saw everything. I wouldn't hide this from you."  
  
"You've hid other things from me." Nano lifted her head up. "Like Rythian."  
  
Lalna stiffened. "That-- that was for your own good."  He swallowed thickly. "I promise-- I just didn't want you caught up in our, old rivalry or whatever it was. I promise."  
  
She looked into his eyes.  
  
"Was this for my own good, too?"  
  
"I don't know." He let go of her. "All I can say is... I didn't do this. I would never do this."  
  
"Alright, well..." She smiled at him a little and hefted her rocket launcher. "I'll file your explanation under 'suspicious' for now."  
  
"I'm finding this book very suspicious." Lalna waved it at her. "It feels like-- like I'm being framed."  
  
Nano raised her eyebrows. "Framed for unspeakable evil." Her joking smile faded quickly. He watched her as she jumped off the reactor and looked around the room with an unreadable expression. She ran a hand over the Flux-coated side of her face up to tangle her fingers in her hair, then looked up at him like a kicked puppy.  
  
"...I wanna go home, Lalna."


	3. Chapter 3

Home was not the relief they were searching for.  
  
Plans had been drafted: to get rid of the taint, and to destroy Lalnable's base of operations, Lalna needed to build some nukes. Nano watched from afar, Tiddles in her arms, as he worked day in, day out on building something he'd never forget how to, even after all this time.  
  
Lalna was known for nukes. Each one was finely crafted, and each one had enough of a payload to reduce Panda Labs to a smoking crater if it got set off on accident. Lalna knew they wouldn't  go off on accident. He'd spent days programming the launch computers and dialing in the coordinates for his castle. He was finally in his element again: Livid, the nuclear physicist, the radioactive scientist, awash in a glow of Cherenkov radiation and with a maniacal grin on his face.  
  
It wasn't until he'd loaded them into the frames and gone back inside with Nano that the memories fell away and he was Lalna again, scared and confused and ready to nuke his home of many years to hopefully save the world.  
  
"Lalna," Nano mumbled softly. He looked down at her with shame on his face, and her gut wrenched in pity. "Do you really want to do this?"  
  
"I do." He ran an oil-stained hand through his hair and Nano wrinkled her nose. "I have to. There's-- there's nothing left salvaging there, anymore. Not anymore." His hands were shaking as he grabbed his mug of coffee and chugged it down in one swift motion. He was still wild-eyed, even as he had snapped out of his trance, and it... frightened Nano. She'd seen him wrapped up in his work before, but not to this extent. Blueprints covered the lower levels of Panda Labs; some scrunched up or shredded, others revised so many times she could no longer read them. It was like something out of a horror movie.  
  
Not all of the blueprints were about nukes.  
  
"CloneSec," she read out from one. "Lalna, what's CloneSec?"  
  
"You don't remember?" He looked up from where he was scribbling on yet another diagram. His gloves were stained white at the fingertips, and his white labcoat was now even more dingy than it had been when they set out to the castle. "I guess I only mentioned it in passing before-- It's a Yoglabs thing."  
  
"Aaaand why do you have diagrams of a Yoglabs thing?" Nano scrutinized it. It reminded her too much of the cryo-tubes in the secret lab, and she felt a little sick. Floorplans and machines blended together in a mess she could barely understand. "What are you up to?"  
  
"Nothing, actually." His eyes darkened. "Just... remembering." He set down his drawing tools and walked over to put an arm around her shoulders. Nano leaned against him as he studied the blueprint she'd been so interested in. He frowned. "This is all done from memory, you know. I was working with Xephos when we both designed it. Who knows how much it's changed since then? I've been gone... a long time."  
  
Lalna took it from where he'd pinned it up and instead set it down on the "war room"'s table. Nano sat next to him as he steepled his fingers, his eyes still scanning the document. She could tell gears were turning in his head as he muttered to himself. Something was bothering him, and it was likely the same thing bothering her. Why did it make her think of Lalnable? What was going on?  
  
"Shit," he hissed suddenly. "No. Nope, this can't be happening."  
  
"What?" Nano looked up at him. "Lalna, what's going on?"  
  
"When I was drafting blueprints for the nukes, something got stuck in my head, so I drew it out--" He tapped the blueprint insistently. "It was this. Yoglabs. CloneSec. I--" He swallowed and rested his head in his hands.  
  
"He's from YogLabs. He has to be."  
  
Nano stared at Lalna like he'd grown a second head, which she wouldn't be surprised at with how much radioactive shit he'd exposed himself to with the reactor and the nukes and all that. "What?" She leaned in to scan the blueprints again. None of it really made much sense to her; his handwriting was even messier than usual, and she could see nothing to point towards why Lalna was so upset. "Um, explanation for the peanut gallery, please?"  
  
Lalna spun his chair around to face her and interlocked his fingers like some kind of supervillain. "Do you remember what I told you before? About cloning, back in New Camelot?"

> "...They stopped cloning me. Yoglabs. It's-- It's standard procedure, all Yoglabs employees have their genome sequenced and a master clone created. I worked there before they had CloneSec set up. I was the test subject for the cloning process; I'd created it in the first place, and no one else was willing to try. You know what happens when you make copies of copies, Nano? They degrade. Mutations become more and more obvious. Chemicals in the brain get imbalanced. Memories get misplaced. My clones-- they went insane, if they even survived the process at all."  
>   
> "A lot of people died because of me and my mistakes, Nano. Even before the Tekkit War. They were clones of me, they weren't really me, but enough trouble happened that they wiped my genome from the database, even after they finally refined it. They were willing to let me die dead if it meant not having another twisted monster on their hands again."

  
"Copes of copies," Nano echoed. "What did you mean, copies of copies? Wouldn't they all just... be clones of you? Not clones of a clone of you?"  
  
"In an ideal world." He smiled wryly. "I'm not the original Lalna. I don't know if the original Lalna even is still alive. There were... tens, hundreds of me, cloned over and over again, trying so, so hard to get it right. To perfect it. To cheat death." His eyes misted up with tears. Nano couldn't do anything but listen. "All of my clones-- they either died as soon as the process was finished, or only lasted a few days, or would-- would kill the rest of their batch and injure any bystanders. The first stable Lalna became the Master Clone: everything else was just a copy of a copy."  
  
"And copies degrade."  
  
Lalna slumped back in his chair. "I don't even know which Lalna I am," he said after a long while. "I remember everything-- but I'm supposed to, death is supposed to be seamless. There are.. glitches in my memory, sometimes, where some events feel like they take place at the same time. But I know I'm the Lalna from the Tekkit War. I know I'm the Lalna that nuked Blackrock. I know I'm the Lalna  that--"  
  
He choked up.  
  
"--has you as my apprentice. My partner."  
  
"Jesus Christ," Nano whispered. "You've been hiding this from me the whole time?"  
  
"Not exactly hiding." He laughed hollowly. "I kept letting things slip. But... there's not supposed to be any Lalnas anymore. I was the last one. There-- there can't be more  than one Lalna, it um. It makes things very bad. Whenever they crossed paths, um, it was really bad. So I-- I'm the only clone from my batch, 42-A, and all the other Lalnas are gone. Died off." Lalna scrunched his eyes shut tight. "I don't like thinking about this."  
  
Nano pulled him into a hug. Lalna wrapped his arms around her tight and sighed deeply. "Whoever Lalnable Hector is," he continued softly, "his journal is dated four years from now. I don't know what happened to 21-L-- the Master Clone-- but if Yoglabs has him down in deep storage instead of just, terminating him, then..."  
  
"...then in the future, someone found him," Nano realized, "and... made Lalnable?"  
  
Lalna looked her in the eyes.  
  
"Or Lalnable is 21-L."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How much is real? So much to question  
> An epidemic of the mannequins  
> Contaminating everything  
> We thought came from the heart  
> It never did right from the start  
> Just listen to the noises
> 
> Null and void instead of voices


End file.
